Audioccult Vol. 20: The Lovers

Light a candle. Draw the required sigils. Now, raise your arms above your head and slowly, gently, exhale your soul. You won’t need it here. This is Audioccult, and it’s time to get low.

Slick hands and a body of bruises. I’m swollen, inside and out, with pleasure. An excessive weekend of cleansing dirt and fire against the sky has left me feeling desolate, yet also loved. Contrasts like this make me so appreciative of being alive (an appreciation which, admittedly, is my general default setting) though some aspects of my written and verbal output may seem temporally bleakbased. This passage through cathartic terror is how I express powerful emotions: for me it’s necessity, and I always do what feels necessary.

This weekend was about love, and self, and, for me, the creative destruction of both. The Lovers was a 24-hour event hosted by the Berlin-based collective Mindpirates. Together with four tour buses of other artists and musicians, we traveled to a remote patch of lakeside farmland to a wooded clearing filled with a massive PA, DIY sound and art installations, food and alcohol….essentially anything you could desire for a creative weekend, all for free. It was magical, an rare and special happening that was filled with double rainbows and sitars during the day, rings of fire and noise and altered minds during the night. It wasn’t an event that needed an outside soundtrack, but on occasion I found it soothing to escape into a remote area of the field and forest. Joining me during these times was a select soundtrack of ritval electronics, duplicated here for your consideration and featuring 2AMFM, Birds of Passage, Alberich, Svreca, Regis, Rrose, Vatican Shadow, Coil, Six Six Seconds, The Cathode Terror Secretion, and Christian Cosmos. It’s cleansing, like hydrochloric acid.

After such an extended period of creativity, no sleep, annnd mmmarching staaaaaarrrrrsssssssssss###########>>> the ego is shattered and what is left to say to the world, when the only translation of your thoughts after green and water and dirt and fire and bass sounds like a ghost. Stagger lightly with floating footsteps to the great vehicle and finally sleep, awaked by the urban vanity of brutal concrete and steel. When I becomes i the only pursuit is to be refined and refound in inflicted whorgasm, slick hands and mouths and flesh… is it possible to find yourself in others? Is it necessary? i forget.